and baby doll, you're all smoke and a tangled heart
by Gray Doll
Summary: He hopes his mind has numbed enough for him to stop thinking about her. She's just so beautiful and so young and so seemingly unconcerned with being saved. But maybe not everyone can be saved, and maybe not everyone wants to. - AU, AH


**a.n./** Well. I always wanted to write something like this, but I'd never thought it'd turn out _like this_. I just sat down in front of an empty Word page and this happened. I don't even know why or how any more. This is wildly, wildly AU, AH, and a little dark – well... it's me.

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**and baby doll, you're all smoke and a tangled heart**

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The palms of her hands clamber across the mahogany, fists clenching and carefully manicured nails boring nonexistent scratches into the wood. He concentrates on some sparkly thing that threads along the edge of her sweater where it's pulled down far enough to stretch. There's a red spot on her neck that her hair would cover if it weren't splayed out across the table, over papers folders pencils pens.

"_Hold on__,"_ she says violently, and the wood beneath her fingernails is actually his skin. The coffee on his desk spills over her thigh, hot brown liquid spitting and spattering up with his hands beneath her skirt.

"_Seriously?__,"_ she hisses, or maybe "_hurry hurry hurry fuck,"_ and he thinks he really needs a painkiller. He's got two hands on her waist, one hand digging in his desk drawer for the little bottle of pills, and he's half panicked because he can't find it when he remembers that he only has two hands, and both of them are squeezing into her milky waist beneath the taut fabric of her skirt.

He takes a deep breath and tries to narrow everything down to the fact that he's buried inside her and she's _hot_ and she's saying _something_ even if he doesn't know what that is. There isn't anything wrong with him, sex is just disorienting.

There's a burn on her leg when she pulls her skirt back down, and it's not long enough to cover up the whole thing. "Clumsy Damon," she says sweetly, as he runs his fingers gently over the red skin. "It's not that bad," and she stands and pulls his head down for a kiss.

"I'm sorry," he says, as she combs down her golden hair and smiles at him. "You said to hold on."

"Hmm?" Katherine asks distractedly, and nuzzles his jaw with her nose. "No, I didn't."

"Oh," he says, and tries one last time as she's checking to make sure that it doesn't look like they just had sex in Damon's office. "I like your sweater."

"I'm not wearing a sweater, honey," and he realizes that she's right so he just reaches for the painkillers inside his desk and watches her go.

There isn't anything wrong with him, he thinks as he turns the little bottle over with shaking hands. Sex is just disorienting.

"That your girlfriend?"

The bottle goes flying, and the little white pills come shattering out, stopping and soaking in the coffee that is cooling on the surface of his desk.

"What do you want, Mikaelson?" Damon asks as steadily as he can, and the blond man's smug grin is sobering like nothing else. Damon closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Everything is calm and cool and he can think again. _Fuck sex,_ he thinks, but that's a lie.

Klaus takes this as an invitation into Damon's office, which is a disgusting mess and smells like sex. Hell, it _looks_ like sex, but Klaus is waggling a thick manila folder and doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the way Damon is attempting to wipe the coffee off of the desk into the bin with a couple blank pieces of paper.

"She's very pretty," Klaus says with the utmost indifference, as though he's talking about his breakfast or the weather.

Damon snorts. "Don't let her hear you say that. She wouldn't want to be remembered as 'pretty.'" Though that's not strictly true, since neither of them really care how she's remembered when she comes to visit him at work, as long as no one says _you know, she looks like your brother's ex wife_ or cares to wonder if Damon has a brother who was once married.

He gives up on the coffee and sits back in his seat, wondering exactly how quickly he can get Klaus out of his office.

"Did you need something?" he asks, when Klaus makes it clear that he isn't going to say anything. He tweaks the edge of one manila folder with his forefinger.

"Case files," he says wickedly, bluntly, and it sounds like he's slipped more of his accent in the words on purpose and Damon's stomach does a little sinking flop.

"Great." He doesn't reach for them in case Klaus can tell how hard his hands are shaking. He's slow with his right hand, where his family's ring used to be, has been ever since that time three years ago, when he fell two stories in SWAT uniform. He went away with a fractured leg that had him in bed for a month, and a mangled wrist injury that left him with ill functioning fingers like early-onset-arthritis for the rest of his goddamn life.

He flexes his fist beneath the table and waits until Klaus bridges the gap between them and throws the file onto the desk. One corner lands in a spot of coffee, and a dark brown stain begins to bloom across the surface.

_Bright red burn on soft flesh._ Damon shakes his head like a horse.

"I'm with you on this one," Klaus is saying now, voice sinking half an octave. Damon eyes him.

"Great," he says. "Someone I can trust."

For a moment Klaus doesn't seem sure if he should laugh or just walk out, but he settles on the former, and even Damon has to crack a smile. It's not that he hates Mikaelson, but the man is certainly more accustomed to thinking than doing – but maybe that's Damon's problem with just about every other person in this building. But even so, there are a thousand other people that Damon would rather partner with.

Klaus is halfway through the door before Damon understands that he's leaving. His fingers brush the moist corner of the case file and he calls, "Mikaelson."

Klaus stops in the threshold. "Yes?"

Damon taps the file with his knuckles. "What am I looking at?"

Klaus smiles, that same smug smile, only it's suddenly too large for his face and it just looks sad. "Five dead girls," and he gestures over his shoulder, out the way that Katherine had come and gone, "that look just like her."

Damon nods and wonders if Klaus can pinpoint on his face the exact moment that his heart explodes. "Alright," he says firmly, trying his best to ignore the feeling of his stomach coiling and clenching.

"Loud," says Klaus.

"I'm sorry?"

"Your girlfriend. I won't remember her as pretty. I'll remember her as loud."

* * *

Damon is expecting a row of bright brown ducklings, with chocolate waves and slim hips and olive skin. Damon is expecting girls that look just like her, because that's what Klaus told him to expect, and now that he's looking at all five pictures, spread out across his bone-dry desk, Damon is too disgusted to wonder what Klaus was implying.

They're all whores, or prostitutes or strippers or exotic dancers, or whatever the politically correct term for it is. Damon doesn't know. He just knows that they all get naked for money, or got naked for money, before some freak put a gun to their chests and pulled the trigger.

Five girls dead in twice as many days, dumped outside the seedy joint where they work— _worked_ —sometime between midnight and two in the morning. Five girls dead, working in the same strip club— the Mystic Grill —with identical gunshot wounds between their breasts, and not one who looks like Katherine. Maybe that means something. Maybe it doesn't.

_No wavy dark hair,_ Damon writes on the blank pad next to him, and then erases it immediately because there is one, she just doesn't look like Katherine, and she has white-blond streaks threaded through her brown tresses. He sets down the pen.

It's too goddamn dark in his office since the sun went down and he's too lazy to turn on the lights and Katherine is calling his phone every ten seconds, which lights up the whole room for a lightening moment every time it buzzes. Damon blames it on Mikaelson, and what he said, because he stares at his five cadaver girls and they start looking just like Katherine, the sore red skin around their wound the color of the burn that coffee makes on soft flesh. There's scorching around the wounds, and something black that looks like marker that has been beautifully blown away. _X marks the spot,_ he thinks, and reaches for a bottle of Vicodin that isn't there.

He is so damn tired but he can't stop looking, more personally than professionally, at the five dead women. He doesn't really care what that says about him as a person, but his phone buzzes and lights up and he hears Katherine saying _stop stop stop_ in Klaus's voice.

Damon wonders how many times these five girls had laid like that, cold and still beneath a man and bore the full brunt of his violence and his lust. Damon wonders if any of them ever wanted to stay _stop,_ or if they would have— could have —even if they did.

He wonders, most of all, how many of these girls were victims _before_ someone shot them down, or if he's just living a fantasy inside his head.

But none of them look like Katherine, because even when he pictures her beneath him, she's always sweaty and flushed and smiling. _Fuck sex,_ he thinks, and the next time his phone buzzes, he picks it up.

* * *

There is something about Damon's smile that makes Katherine uncomfortable. Something about the way it seems plastered on and doesn't fit quite right. Something is wrong, and Katherine knows it from the moment she wakes up in an empty bed.

If the colossal pile of french toast beside the stove is anything to go by, Damon has been up for hours. The air smells sweet, like syrup and cinnamon and whatever secret spice that Damon always adds. On a normal day, the smell would make her mouth water, but today it makes her stomach turn. She focuses on not vomiting.

Damon is just staring at her, with a look that says 'everything's fine.' Katherine knows that everything is _not,_ but she can't think of anything to say. That's when she notices the crime scene photos spread out on the counter, next to a wrinkled envelope and a little pool of spilled orange juice that hasn't been cleaned up. The rational part of her reaches for a paper towel even as her hand darts out toward one of the photos, turning it toward her. She touches it gingerly, quickly, as though if she holds it too long it will bite her.

"Katherine," Damon says finally, a moment too late.

The photograph might as well have burnt her for the jump backward Katherine takes when she really _sees_ it. It's not that she hasn't known what Damon's been dealing with, but it's different when she actually sees it. It's different when the girl is so clearly cold and dead and doll-like; _used abused destructed._

Katherine freezes. She feels her heart squeeze until it's just a tiny, barely-there glob of pulp inside her chest, and then it implodes, a microscopic burst of pain and horror and disgust. She takes one step back, and then another, away from Damon's outstretched arms, away from his tear stained face and the big stack of french toast that isn't going to get eaten.

"Oh," she says quietly, and that's all it takes. Damon swings around, a growl of fury and frustration and excruciating pain ripping itself from his throat as he punches the wall across from her so hard that his fist goes through.

When Damon pulls his hand out, shaking the dust and little chips of plaster into a pile on the floor, Katherine is standing right behind him. It's her turn to outstretch her arms, and this time Damon collapses into them, sobbing and sobbing and feeling like a fool.

"It's going to be okay," Katherine whispers, and when she feels Damon's heartbeat against her cheek, she knows that, in some ways, it already is.

She wakes up in an empty bed the next morning. The sun has not even risen. She finds Damon in the living room, asleep on the sofa, one arm hanging precariously over the side. She pads across the room, cold feet against the cold floor, before she notices the drywall repair kit splayed open beside the wall.

The hole is gone, though a neat outline remains to betray that it once existed. From the mess and the way that Damon has plaster smeared across his face and hands, Katherine can tell that it was a hard job to repair the wall even that much. She sighs and turns from the scarred wall, climbing aboard the sofa like she would a lifeboat, wrapping her arms around Damon as best she can and burying her face in the crook of his neck.

Damon's dangling arm flies up, curling around Katherine and staying there. They don't wake up till noon.

They take the french toast to the homeless shelter down the street. It's too sweet and they're too sad, and adding salt would only turn it to mush.

* * *

Klaus is obviously familiar with the place in a way that makes Damon uncomfortable, but in all honesty it is none of his business where he chooses to spend his time. Damon just looks at his feet and follows him across the purple carpet, sucking in calming breaths and squeezing his badge in his pocket so tightly that the edges leave red indentations in his skin. It's after closing time, just after three in the morning on a Wednesday— or Thursday, now. The floor is strewn with cigarettes, the entire place lit up by ugly fluorescents so that the motley cleaning crew can see what they are doing, and maybe clear away half the night's flotsam before tomorrow, if they're lucky.

"I bet it looks nicer under a black light," Damon says quietly, and Klaus says something that sounds like _it does,_ but Damon decides that he's probably imagining things.

What's missing are the girls, who Damon imagine try to clear out of here pretty fast, get back to their kids or their sisters or their parents or whoever it is they're working to support— or maybe they're just working until they can get the hell out. Or maybe he just has a glorified view of everyone. He thinks of Katherine. His phone doesn't buzz.

A curvy, blond haired woman greets them in the back, her mouth painted up in a macabre blood red smile that splits and shows them that her trim white teeth are stacked in orderly little rows. She greets them— or rather Klaus —with a handshake that almost turns into a hug, before Klaus stops to think and takes a warning step away.

"This is my partner, Officer Salvatore," he says smoothly, and the blonde looks him up and down. She looks just like a doll, Damon realizes, all cinched up and held together by the ties and folds of all her clothes. Her breasts are monstrous, distracting and incongruous on her lithe frame, and Damon finds himself looking away from this living Barbie. The woman's satisfied smile suggests she does not understand the reason.

_He_ is _my_ partner_,_ Damon almost says to her, but that would sound ridiculously stupid so he just bites his lip and nods at the contrast between his feet and the carpet.

"Can we make this quick?" he says quietly.

Klaus sends him a glare that could curdle milk, and adds, "For the girls' sake."

The pause between is nearly fatal, but some unspoken signal passes from Klaus to Barbie. "I'm sure the girls would appreciate that," she says finally.

"Your name?" Damon adds, as an afterthought, but she is already opening the door at the end of the hall. Barbie doesn't answer, and Damon does not press it, and Klaus gives him another pointed look that starts the voices in his head. He walks through the next door and thinks of Katherine putting on her swimsuit in the summer—

"Motherfucker, Bonnie. Where did you put my goddamn skirt? I'm not walking home like this, and…." She's a petite but rounded brunette wearing a big sweater and a purple g-string, and when Damon catches sight of her, scrambling frantically through her bag in a room with nine other fully clothed women, he stops so suddenly in the doorway that Klaus slams into his back.

_Katherine swimsuit summer._

_Turn away,_ his mind is screaming, but he doesn't, and he can't help but imagine Katherine in a get-up like that— she would _never_ —and his face turns red before he can control himself. Katherine wears expensive lace or nothing at all; he can hear her laughing _fuck panty lines_ in shrill giggles inside his head. His hand in his pocket jumps between his phone and his badge with stiff fingers as though one of them will turn into a tiny little bottle filled with Vicodin.

"Hey," the brunette snaps. "I'm off duty. Eyes up here." She kicks her bag across the floor, still wearing nothing but the sweater and the g-string, and Damon's mouth goes so dry that he almost walks back out to the car right then and there. Klaus shoves him so hard in the back that he staggers forward, and when the smaller man comes up beside him, flashing everyone in the room what is supposed to be a sympathetic grin, it's all Damon can do not to punch him in the face.

"Our apologies," he says smoothly, and produces his badge from his pocket in an effortless swirl of nimble fingers. "But we were hoping for a minute of your time." It's elegant and beautiful, the way Klaus makes it seem as though they have a choice, and Damon feels as though he is on the edge of an anxiety attack, so he closes his mouth and doesn't say a word.

The process takes them over two hours, photographing and speaking to each girl. Klaus does most of the speaking, and Damon all the photographing, and when he gets to the little brunette girl with the round face she winks into the camera and almost causes Damon to drop it. He's so uncomfortable that he doesn't bother to check if her eye is closed in the picture, and moves onto the next girl without another word.

By the time they get out of there, nine pictures heavier and without an ounce of useful information, Damon is so desperate for a breath of fresh air that Klaus talks to him for ten minutes before Damon hears a word of it. Mostly he nods and clutches the department-registered camera to his chest, and when his phone buzzes in his pocket, he jumps three feet in the air.

"Night, Mikaelson," he says, even though Klaus is in the middle of a sentence, and presses the phone to his ear.

"Hey, hon," Damon says softly. He's unlocking his car door when Klaus calls after him.

"Damon," he calls, and the sun is just starting to come up. "We don't know anything!"

Damon slams the door behind him and sets two hands on the wheel, pressing the phone to his ear with his shoulder.

"When are you going to be home, baby?" Katherine asks sleepily, and Damon thinks that Klaus's wrong. He knows a lot of things— or people, at least; girls with names like Amber and Pinky and Sparkle, who, when he thinks about, can be anyone he wants if he has the imagination for it.

"Ten minutes," he says into the phone, and takes a sharp left onto Pico.

* * *

The nine photos he's just taken are stacked up on the corner of his desk at home, and Damon's hunched over the photos of the corpses from the case file. His five sweet cadavers stare empty icicles up at him. _Naked naked naked and a bullet between their breasts,_ he thinks, and he thinks it to a tune that has him tapping his foot against the ground. He hums under his breath. _Naked naked and a bullet between their breasts._

But that's the problem. He stares at this similarity, this burning, blaring fact that makes the girls identical, that unites them under the umbrella of one killer's vicious tirade, and cannot find for the life of him a single other thing these women have in common.

_Big breasts small breasts blond hair blue eyes no make up purple nail polish white skin freckled cheeks._

And still, _naked naked naked and a bullet between their breasts._

"Dark hair dark eyes long legs wide hips tanned skin red lips," he lists all the ways they're different from Katherine in droves, tapping off his foot to keep the tune.

Katherine slips into the room behind him; he hasn't slept since he got home that morning only slightly panicked at five-thirty. Katherine had embraced him, and held his head to her chest while he listened to her breathe. He's meeting Mikaelson tomorrow, seven o'clock in his office with the photos and some coffee that his hands have promised not to spill.

And now, well, now it's getting dark out and Katherine is wearing one of his old SWAT t-shirts, and when she slips her arms around his neck, the tension drains from him like blood from a wound. _Between their breasts,_ he thinks, and says, "Tall, short; chubby, skinny; white, Asian." He taps each photo for emphasis, and leans his head back over the edge of his chair until he's looking at her upside-down. She presses a kiss to his forehead and touches two adjacent photos with her pointer and middle fingers. She's gotten good at pretending the photos do not bother her.

"Trimmed cunt, bare cunt," she says, and Damon struggles to his feet.

"I don't want you looking at those," he says quietly, folding her into his arms and pressing his nose into her hair.

"What?" she laughs. "Like I've never seen another woman naked before."

Damon can't help but smile. "You know that's not what I mean."

"Well then fuck you, Damon. I'll look at whatever I please." Then she's kissing him, with her long fingers threaded through his hair. He hasn't showered in almost twenty-four hours, and he is suddenly immersed in all the sweaty grimy places that they're touching, the way her forearm brushes up along his chest, the way her breasts come free from his t-shirt with the slightest bounce. They make love on the floor, by the orange light of his desk lamp, under the eerie eyes of dead photographed icicles.

When it's over, they lie on the floor, trembling in each other's arms.

"I love you, Katherine," he says quietly.

"Yeah. I love me too," Katherine says, the hint of a smile in her voice; Damon laugh, and lays his head down like a bullet between her breasts.

* * *

"The rape kits," he roars, triumphant, as he crashes through the door to Klaus's office just after noon. He has been staring at the pictures again for hours, but Damon is sure that he has got it now. "We need to see the rape kits."

Klaus looks up from his computer, so apparently bored with this suggestion that it makes Damon feel physically ill. "There weren't any rape kits taken," he says evenly, and turns back to the screen.

"Why the hell not?" Damon snaps, and Klaus exhales slowly, as though he is about to explain something incredibly simple to a very young child. Damon is taken with the overpowering urge to punch him in the face, but he forces an equally deep breath and slams his hands into his pockets, where the right traces the cap of his bottle of Vicodin.

Klaus leans back in his chair. "They swabbed for fluids and DNA— post-mortem, obviously. No signs of semen—"

"All that proves is that our killer wasn't stupid enough to have unprotected sex with someone having sex with anyone who can afford it," Damon interrupts, anger flaring up inside him.

"Will you let me finish? No signs of semen, you're right, doesn't mean anything. But the cursory examination didn't show any signs of rape, particularly violent or otherwise. That these girls had sex sometime soon before their deaths is likely, but that they were raped… it wasn't worth it."

"Dammit, Mikaelson," Damon spits. "They should have taken a kit."

Klaus shrugs and picks at the edge of his desk. "Maybe they should have. I don't know. I'm not a doctor, and neither are you."

Damon shakes his head and glares at the floor.

"They were corpses, Damon," Klaus says quietly. "They were already dead. A rape kit's not standard for this type of thing."

Silence. _They were already dead. Trixy, Amber, Sparkle, Pinky. She's already dead._

"They were whores, Damon."

Damon doesn't know what that has to do with anything, but he doesn't like the tone of Klaus's voice and he doesn't like the way he keeps saying his name.

"You're a cold, fucked-up bastard," Damon whispers, and manages not to punch a hole in the door on his way out.

* * *

Katherine wakes up in a dream to the shrill call of a seagull. She's sailing, and the cool wind whips her face, and she tastes salt. The sails fill, and so do Katherine's lungs, making matching movements within her chest as the boat flutters across the water. The entire moment is altogether too peaceful, too placid, even as the waves slap against the hull. Katherine leans back to keep her feet.

But the waves won't stop coming, and Katherine actually grins at the sport of it all. The boat sways from side to side, and for the first time she hears laughter. Her head flies up, and she glances around, but the water stretches on for miles and the whole world is empty under the scorching sun. A wave hits, the boat reels, and Katherine leans back when she should be leaning forward.

She hears the din of waiting room noises, loud and shrill, coming from somewhere across the water where she cannot reach, and then her own voice, crying out _I'm his sister in law. Let me see him! I'm his sister in law!_ Katherine takes a deep breath in, and the sails swell, and the dark surface of the water rushes up to meet her.

She surfaces with a gasp, the thundering tidal wave of the comforter splashing all around her. Katherine flails, her open palms wildly seeking the solid hull of the boat, before she registers the calm and the quiet and the heat of her own bed. Her hand latches on to her only refuge, finally, coming up against the strong, soft side of something warm.

Damon rolls over, groggily, and his arms find their way around Katherine's waist. "Go back to sleep," he murmurs, before taking his own advice. Katherine sighs, and, grateful that she can no longer hear the gulls over Damon's snoring, lays her head against his chest.

It's been happening like this for three years now, ever since Damon's accident. She has the 'falling dreams' almost every night, and every night she wakes in a panic, only to find Damon alive and well and sleeping soundly. Sometimes, she thinks that it haunts her more than him, but then she sees the Vicodin sitting on his bedside table, and notices the way he flexes his fingers whenever he watches football. Sometimes, she notices the way he looks too big for his desk chair, and the way he both loves and hates to see her in one of his old SWAT shirts.

She runs her palm along the muscled expanse of his stomach, and listens to his heartbeat as his chest rises and falls.

Then, just before she falls asleep, Katherine tastes salt. Whether from her tears or from the ocean, she cannot say.

* * *

It's six AM on a Sunday morning, and the phone starts ringing like a hammer inside his head. Katherine is curled around him, soft and smooth beneath their wrinkled linen sheets. Her endless body twists and curves apart against him, as he rolls for the phone and knocks into a little bottle that rattles and goes rolling beneath their bed.

"Salvatore," Damon grunts into the phone. "Salvatore here," and then there's Klaus's breath like panic on the other line. It sobers him like nothing else, and Damon sits up so fast that his elbow knocks into Katherine's face. She yelps, pinches his forearm in retaliation and rolls out of bed with a muffled grunt.

"Mikaelson," Damon growls. "This had better be important."

"Forgive me," Klaus replies dryly, "for interrupting your lazy day, but another girl is dead."

Damon flashes on nine names that he is already starting to forget. _Amber Sparkle Trixy with a bullet between their breasts._

"Are you listening to me, Damon? Becau—"

"I'll be in your office in fifteen minutes," Damon snaps and slams the phone down onto his bedside table. He passes Katherine coming out of the bathroom, holding a bloody tissue against her nose.

"I'm sorry," he calls over his shoulder, and she flips him off with her free hand. He can tell from her eyes that she is laughing, but when he closes the bathroom door behind him, all he can imagine is her staring empty icicles from a glossy sheet of paper.

When he flies out of the bathroom, two minutes later, she's already fallen back asleep.

Standing in Klaus's office, sixteen minutes and seventeen seconds later, as the man points out with a sick grin, Damon is on the verge of panic. On the car ride over, he combined all of the strippers into one woman, one woman with a weird name and features that change with the wind. He swallows hard and accepts the folder that Klaus hands him, and when he opens it up and prepares to be sick, the face inside belongs to a stranger.

"Who the fuck is this?" he snarls, and Klaus takes a seat behind his desk.

"That's Caroline. Caroline Forbes."

Damon blinks. "We didn't talk to a Caroline Forbes."

"I know," says Klaus.

"Mikaelson," Damon hisses, fighting to keep himself under control. His hand is shaking and his stiff fingers fumble with the file, so that he finally has to throw it in Klaus's face, or else risk dumping the papers all across the floor. The glossy picture of Caroline, lying still, pinned to the antiseptic table by a bloody bullet hole, flutters slowly down, catching the light and turning white and then flaming back to color again. It lands in front of Klaus on his desk. "What the _fuck_ is going on?"

Klaus sits perfectly still, staring through the storm of papers as they settle to the floor.

"I think it's fairly obvious," he says finally. "We didn't talk to Caroline, and now Caroline is dead."

Damon takes a deep breath. "But why didn't we talk to her?" he asks.

Klaus splays his fingers across Caroline's glossy face and pushes the photograph toward Damon. "Why don't you ask _her,"_ Klaus says coldly. "Because I sure as hell don't know."

* * *

Katherine slurps up a mouthful of spaghetti and balances the plate on the sofa armrest. She's wearing one of his old shirts again— she's always wearing one of his old shirts —with nothing underneath. Damon can track the soft course of her thigh until it falls into shadow, and see the coarse gray fabric drawn across her leg where he burned her.

"How many others, Katherine? How many others could have slipped by?"

Katherine shakes her head and waves her forth. "One, two, a hundred, I don't know Damon." She says his name like he's been talking about this for hours, and part of him knows that he has. At the same time, he's reluctant to let it go, not when he sees Klaus's cold eyes and smug smirk every time he stops to breathe. _He isn't helping,_ Damon thinks, and runs a hand through his hair. His palm is sweaty. Why is his palm sweaty.

Katherine throws the container of cheese across the room so hard that it strikes Damon in the side of the head. "Hey," she snaps. "Are you even listening to me?"

"No," he says bluntly, and rubs the side of his head. His own spaghetti tastes like ash in his mouth and he sets the plate aside, having eaten enough of it to not hurt Katherine's feelings. She's not the type to get sensitive over something like this, but he feels bad anyway. He thinks he catches her eyes following his plate, but then he knows he must have imagined it.

"I said," Katherine continues, "that you should go back. Alone. Without your badge."

"They'll remember—"

"They won't remember. They see a couple hundred men a night wandering around that place, someone who looks familiar might just be a drunk who gave a particularly large tip six or seven nights back."

"You sound so confident," Damon says, and snorts.

Katherine shrugs and takes another bite of spaghetti. "Either go back and settle your fears, or shut the fuck up about it."

He gapes at her for a moment, and then shakes his head. "If I go, I'm not taking Mikaelson. I don't like the looks."

Katherine grins. "Men are pigs."

"No," Damon says, and stares vacantly at her empty bowl of spaghetti. "I don't like the way _they_ look at _him."_

* * *

Katherine is snoring, balled up in bed beside him with her head planted firmly on the pillow. He has his bedside lamp on the lowest setting, so as not to wake her, as he scribbles the last few lines of his closing report. All the boxes are checked and the 'i's dotted, and the words 'violent crime' and 'no extraordinary evidence of sociopathic tendencies' burn holes in Damon's brain.

He'll turn this over to his superior in the morning, after he drops it on Mikaelson's desk and gets the signature. This case isn't for them; three weeks of pouring over the same old evidence, getting to know the same six dead girls. Damon is tired, so very tired, and they're to the point when there's nothing left to do but turn it over to the LAPD and watch it sit in an unsolved case file for another couple months. Years, maybe.

Or maybe another girl will die and they'll be right back where they started.

Damon scribbles his signature at the bottom of the form and rearranges the pages so that they fit inside the manila envelope in his bedside table. There is a second pile of papers in this lap; the photos, the crime scene catalogue, all the business records that the Mystic Grill had handed over. His eyes fall on the expense reports, and the section halfway down the page where all paychecks paid in the last six months are noted. He glances over the cleaning crew and down over the list of dancers.

"Oh, fuck," he breathes, and clambers for the snapshots on the floor beside his bed. He lays them out one by one, in careful order, over the sloping mountains formed by the curves of Katherine's body. He lays them gently out around him as she sleeps and gives a little snuffling snore that makes him smile for the bare hint of a second. He loves her, truly.

He snatches up a pen. _Onetwothreefourfivesix dead_, and Damon puts lines through all their names. Now onto the living, he counts nine more, the same nine that they talked to in the Mystic Grill all those weeks ago. He crosses out those names as well.

Damon sits like that for a long time, beside his living breathing sleeping girlfriend in their bed, surrounded by the women with their icicles for eyes. Fifteen photographs around him in the pseudo-darkness, and all Damon can do is stare at the last, sixteenth name on the list. _Angel_.

"Angel," he breathes to himself. _You are faceless._

* * *

Damon goes to find the dancer who doesn't exist. He's dressed down since last time, and it's been three and a half weeks by the time he walks into the Mystic Grill with his hand clutching his little bottle of Vicodin inside his pocket.

Barbie greets him at the door, a bundle of smiles and sewn together sunshine for the handsome man who's not a cop. Damon smiles back, but he's thinking of slim hips and Katherine's cooking and how it always tastes disgusting even though he loves her.

When he asks for Angel, Barbie does not seem surprised, but gives him a wink that's threaded to her big blue eye like a button. Damon swallows a sudden wash of bile and follows her to the back, through the same main room as before. He was right: the place is different during business hours, when the strobe lights burn into his retinas and the girls he knows he's met before look not at all the same. For one thing they're all naked, for another they're all moving, in terrifying gyrations that make Damon's stomach swell and churn.

Barbie leads him across the carpet, which, once barren, is not coated and blanketed in the urgent steps of all the eager men. Some brush against him as he pushes through, moving against the pull of the roaring tide.

_No,_ he thinks in a sudden panic, _I don't want to look at them,_ even though he examines their faces nightly under his desk lamp's sickly glow. He's just afraid, so violently afraid that if he's forced to make eye contact, they'll all just look like corpses, swaying on their feet.

He follows Barbie to the opposite side of the room, down the same hallway as before to a door he hadn't noticed. _Angel,_ someone's written on the door, in what looks like thick black marker. Damon doesn't like the way the letters are not uniform. It looks as though a little girl might have written them, or perhaps an older man who simply did not care. He avoids Barbie's eyes as she opens the door and welcomes him inside.

And the door swings shut on a barren, antiseptic room, on a world of what walls and cold air. A girl is sitting on the bed. _A child,_ Damon thinks, and his eyes take in her nudity even as he tries to look away. She is all slim hips and budding breasts, and her thin hands are knotted in her lap. Damon feels as though it's too cold for her to be naked, and he shivers on her behalf, and partially because the only other option is vomiting, and he is much too frightened to allow that to happen.

"What's your name?" he says quietly, and she peers up at him between her long brown tresses.

"Angel," she says. Her hands come up, not to hide her nudity but to push back her hair and expose her face, so that her big chocolate eyes can come fully into view. She meets his gaze, unabashed, and Damon tries to take a step backward, as the empty icicles that haunt his nightmares from the depths of his six cold cadavers dazzle in the sockets of a very living girl. _His living, breathing Katherine and this living, breathing angel. God damn._

"No," he breathes. "Your real name."

"Angel," she repeats. "My name _is _Angel."

Damon looks around the room, at the emotionless color of the wall, at the empty bed with the scratchy sheets, at the door and the walls without windows and the emptiness that closes in around him like a vice. There is a photograph, a scrap of shiny paper taped to the wall beside the pillow on the bed. A blue sky and a green line of grass and two girls, one of them surrounded by a swirl of snowy feathers that the other has torn out of a pink pillow; torn edges and places worn from a thumb tracing over them time and again.

"Angel," Damon says, and oh god he can't stop saying her name like it's some kind of disease, "do you _live_ here?"

She stares at him. Her eyes cut him open like a vicious pair of knives.

"Angel—"

"On my back or on my knees, _sir?_" she hisses. Her voice cracks in the middle, a high pitched thing that is so close to tears that the icy glaze over her eyes splits for just a second. Her gaze flickers to the ground.

She has a birthmark on her belly, a small brown splotch against her smooth skin in the shape of a little flying bird that looks like the picture of an angel if he looks close enough.

"Angel," he says again, and gently raises her chin so that she has to look him in the eyes. "How _old_ are you?"

* * *

He vomits in the alleyway outside, and dials Klaus in the same breath as he's wiping the vomit from his lips. The phone rings and rings and rings and when Klaus doesn't pick up, Damon throws it against the ground. The battery pops out, but it doesn't break, and Damon stuffs all the pieces into his pocket. It's one AM.

Then he takes them out and puts it back together and calls Klaus again. The phone rings and rings and rings and goes to voicemail and for the first time ever, Klaus's voice doesn't calm Damon down. He turns and vomits again, relieving an empty stomach all over the pavement.

_Fifteen__ years old,_ he thinks, as he stumbles up the street toward the parking garage where he parked his car.

_On my knees or on my back?_ he asks himself over and over again in the elevator, as he passes by empty floor after empty floor of the deserted garage.

By the time he's approaching his car, across an empty expanse of concrete, past a dizzying array of white lines, Damon's mind has numbed enough for him to stop thinking about Angel. She's just so beautiful and so young and so seemingly unconcerned with being saved. _Not everyone wants to saved,_ he muses. _And not everyone is worth saving._

His shoes make ugly clacking sounds against the concrete as he hurries toward his car, waiting for the phone to buzz in his pocket. Klaus or Katherine, he doesn't really care. Fuck it, his dead mother could call him up right now and Damon would just pick up the goddamn phone and cry. But the garage is dark and the garage is deep and night is strangling him with Angel's tiny hands.

There's one other car, parked all the way across the lot, which Damon can tell has the windows down and the engine running from all the way over here. He wishes he were carrying his gun, because this isn't a safe neighborhood and he suddenly feels incredibly vulnerable. Damon's twisting his key into the driver's side door when he hears it, the static-filled sound of a song turned ringtone.

It splits the silence of the garage with its grainy beat, and Damon stands stock still as it plays and plays and plays, from the car on the other side of the garage.

_Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster._

_Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster._

Damon turns back toward is car and sees it.

On the windshield, where he'd missed it before in the darkness, are a bra and a pair of panties. They're soaking wet in something, and Damon almost reaches out to touch them before he realizes that it's blood. The ruined lingerie clings to the glass. Damon drops his keys.

There's a screech of tires against concrete, and Damon whirls, and the car from the other end of the garage is speeding down the ramp, taking the turns too fast and too recklessly and getting away none the lest.

_Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster._

Damon thinks about giving chase, but when he bends down to pick up his keys, somehow he manages to just end up sitting down on the ground and starting to cry.

* * *

"She's fifteen, Katherine, and they're _fucking_ her." Damon hasn't told her about the blood yet. He scrubbed it all off a block away from their apartment, even though technically it's evidence. It's against protocol, but so are the guns in his trunk and the fact that the closing report he should have days ago is buried in his desk at work.

Katherine is walking around in just one of his t-shirts, and every time she paces across the room, he catches sight of a little more leg. It's sick for him to be aroused right now, but he swears there's nothing wrong with him. "I don't know if you should judge," she says finally, and his eyebrows shoot up into his hair.

She pads over to him and straddles his lap, and places one small hand over his heart. "People want a lot of things that they shouldn't," she says firmly.

"She's a little girl," Damon spits back.

"So was I." Katherine's eyes aren't accusatory, but they cut him open nonetheless.

"But I wasn't _taking_— or paying, and it was always only me, before Stef-." He stops, swallows, and grasps her hands. "It was because you said it was okay."

It's like she can breathe in what he needs then, because she's reaching between them and unbuttoning his pants, and she slides down onto him with his shirt on and everything. He wants to say it's frantic but it's not, even though it feels like it, even though he's breathing like he's in a panic and her hands are clawing at his hair. She wrings him dry of tears and blood and everything, with this nauseating pulling in the space between their bodies, a feeling that makes him so desperate to become her that he almost falls apart. Her hands are holding him together, pressed flat against his chest, and she looks into his eyes and wills him to be whole.

"You wanted her," she says, matter-of-factly, in this calm _we're not having sex_ voice that he didn't know was possible.

"Yes," he whispers.

She kisses him and cants her hips, and he breathes his soul up to the ceiling and accepts his absolution beneath the smooth palms of her hands.

* * *

He calls his supervisor in the morning, from the comfort of his bed. He's buried beneath the covers and crushed beneath Katherine, who is splayed across his chest and tangled in his legs and clinging to him in her sleep like moss to the side of a rock. Damon doesn't mind; in fact, he likes it better this way, when he can feel the shudder of her breath against him and know that he can keep her safe.

The phone rings almost to the last by the time his supervisor picks up, and Damon doesn't let him get a single word in edgewise.

"Elijah," Damon barks. "I want to file a report. Prostitution of a minor. And I want it to go through, not tomorrow or next week or in three months, I want it to go through this afternoon."

"Damon," Elijah sighs, and Damon can practically hear him rubbing his forehead. "There's protocol for this. You know that."

"And you know that that protocol isn't worth shit. It gets _nothing_ done. That's why I'm calling you."

"That's not how this works. You have to do it the right way."

Despite the other man's flowing, soothing voice, Damon almost throws the phone against the wall, but Katherine stirs and wriggles in his arms, so he just takes a deep breath and focuses on not screaming.

"The right way? There's a fifteen-year-old girl in our city getting fucked to pieces. Christ, Elijah. Practically the first words she said to me were, 'on my knees or on my back.' There is a time for protocol, and—"

"And that's all there's time for. Damon, listen— Are you saying that you talked to her? Is this related to the sextuple-homicide case?"

"You're damn right it is," Damon growls into the phone. "And that's why— "

He nearly shrieks as Elijah cuts him off again. "Damon," Elijah says tiredly. "You've been taken off that case."

That stops Damon dead. "What? Why?" Though he can think of about a thousand reasons he deserves to be taken not only off the case but off the force, he cannot think of a single reason that anyone other than he and Katherine know about.

"The closing report was filed yesterday morning. We sent copies of all related files off to the LAPD last night."

"Goddammit," Damon roars, and Katherine topples away from him, thrashing wildly.

"What is it?" she shrieks, throwing back the covers and examining Damon for any sign of injuring.

"What was that?" Elijah asks, and Damon holds a single finger to his lips. Katherine blushes furiously, but has the good grace at least not to slap him. He watches her roll out of bed and pad toward the bathroom. Her nakedness is splendid in the pale light of morning.

"Nothing. Elijah, who filed a closing report? I sure as hell didn't sign one."

Elijah sighs and static crackles in Damon's ear. "I've got it here, hold on." There is rustling on the other end of the line, before Damon hears a drawer slam closed and Elijah resume breathing into the receiver. "Dated just a week ago," he reads off the top. "Signed by one D. Salvatore and one K. Mikaelson."

"_Fuck,"_ Damon howls, and this time he _does_ throw the phone. It crashes and cracks against the far wall, just as Katherine opens the door to the bathroom. She stands in the doorway, wrapped in a towel though she hasn't taken a shower.

They stare at each other, until finally she closes the space between them. Damon thinks, for a moment, that she is going to fall into his arms, but she crawls onto the bed and slaps him clean across the face. His cheeks sting; his vision blurs.

"Damon," she says hysterically. "What is going on?"

He doesn't know what to tell her. _There's nothing wrong with me. It's all just so disorienting._

* * *

He stops by the office on his way to see Angel. Klaus isn't in his office, which only stands to reason since it's after office hours for everyone. Damon lets himself in anyway. The desk is in its usual state of immaculate perfection, belongings arranged artistically against the mahogany.

_He's probably never had sex in here,_ Damon thinks, and scans the room for some clue as to where Klaus has gone. His head hurts, and one moment he can remember handing the closing report to Klaus, and the next he can't. The room starts spinning, and Damon is groping desperately in his pocket for something to steady him.

_My phone and my badge and my phone and my badge,_ he hums to himself. _Naked naked naked with a bullet between their breasts._

As he lies there, suddenly prostrate on Klaus's office floor, Damon wonders for the first time if he should tell Katherine about the dizziness and the memory lapses. He wonders what she would think if she knew about the large periods of time when he can't remember what he's been doing, when he forgets about her smile and can only remember how icicles feel, melting in the feverish palms of his hands.

In the end, despite all his thoughts of Katherine, it's Angel's face that he pictures as he pulls himself off of the floor, as he ignores the sweat dripping down the back of his neck and flees the building.

As it happens, she's _packing_ when he gets there. Damon doesn't ask for her this time, merely pays the entrance fee and meanders toward the back, dutifully ignoring the men and the women and the nudity and the sweat and the smoke.

His hand is trembling as it closes on the door handle, and his eyes, though pointed toward the ground, can only see the word _Angel_, written in big block letters on the door. When the handle yields easily beneath his touch, Damon wonders what's to keep her from simply walking out. He's seen her naked and he wonders where she hides her scars. If he unzipped her cold façade, would that expose them?

_There's nothing wrong with me. Sex is just disorienting._ He repeats this like a mantra as he eases open the door and slips inside, and the sight of her naked and defiant flashes before his eyes. He is simultaneously sickened and relieved when he sees her standing there, wearing clothes that must be two sizes too large and hang off of her slim frame.

Angel does not seem surprised to see him. She looks up for a moment, and then goes back to her task: carefully unsticking her single photograph from the wall. She is bent down so low that her nose almost brushes against the wall.

"Hello," he says awkwardly. "I'm Damon. Do you remember me?" _At all? How many men have you fucked since then?_

"What do you want?" she asks.

_That's not very polite,_ he almost says, and then catches himself. "Are you going somewhere?" he asks instead, and gestures pointedly at the small backpack beside her bed.

"I'm leaving," she says matter-of-factly.

"You're leaving," he repeats.

She nods, and folds the little photograph into halves, then quarters. Then she tucks it in her pocket and zips up her pack.

"Where are you going?"

She stares at him blankly. "You should go."

"Why?" he blurts out.

Angel shrugs. "She'll be coming to get me. She won't want to see you."

"Who?" Damon asks, even as his panicked brain screams, _Barbie__._

"You need to leave," Angel repeats, and this time she starts walking toward him. Damon is so afraid to touch her, so terribly certain that if he brushes against her, one of them will break, that he allows her to back him up toward the door. She reaches with two small hands to part her messy dark hair, and he is thrown into the past, back to the first day that he met her when she exposed her brittle body to his prying eyes. As she brushes her hair aside, her baggy shirt rides up, and he sees a flash of smooth stomach, and the birdie-birthmark flying across her skin.

_I'm sorry,_ he wants to scream, and he wants to pick her up and carry her away. He thinks suddenly of Elijah, and realizes that this is why there is protocol, so that a stupid, clueless man like him doesn't have to make decisions.

Because, in the end, for all his self-righteous desperation, for all the time and thought and feeling he has put into this, Damon still hasn't the slightest idea what he is going to do. She's forcing him into the hallway, and he's letting her, even though he wants to rip his skin apart and scream and save her.

"Angel," he hisses desperately, at the single big brown eye that shows through the crack in the door. "Where are you going?"

The door halts, for just a moment, and he thinks he hears her weak and trembling hopeful voice, "Duck hunting."

"Duck hunting?," he repeats, incredulous, and Angel's gaze darts toward the floor.

"He said—" she breathes, and then slams shut the door before he can hear what she's about to say. He tries the handle, but it's already been locked.

* * *

He's been driving for fifteen minutes, and, though he's almost home, he can't stop thinking about Angel. He wonders what the right thing to do is, and if he would be able to do it, even if he knew. He wonders if she's always been so quiet and where she is going and who is coming to take her away. He wonders what it means to go duck hunting.

* * *

Damon sees her, in his mind's eye, lifting her arms to expose her stomach again and again.

* * *

_Duck hunting._

X marks the spot.

He slams on the brakes and screeches to a halt and thanks every god he can think of that the streets are deserted at this time of the night. He jams his hand into his pocket, searching for his phone, which Katherine taped together before he left that morning.

"I'm sorry," she'd whispered in his ear, and pressed a kiss to his lips.

"I'm sorry, too," he'd replied, and she'd jammed the phone into his hand.

"I'm worried about you, Damon," she'd said, and even though he knew that she couldn't know about his slow mental collapse, he pretended that was what she was referring to.

"I know, Kat," he'd whispered, and pressed a kiss into her hair, and held her just beside the door because he had had too.

Now, he dials her frantically, hitting all the wrong buttons in his haste. The phone rings once, then twice, and—

"Damon," she breathes into the receiver, and she sounds so relived just to hear from him that his heart almost crumbles.

"My case files," he blurts out. "Did I leave them on my desk?"

He can hear her walking from room to room, and then the definite rustle of papers as she turns through all the rubbish piled on his desk.

"I don't see them. What's going o—"

"Shit," he hisses.

"Damon—"

"Katherine. I need you to listen to me. You have to get in the car, and you have to drive down to the Mystic Grill and you need to get Angel."

"_Damon—"_ Her voice cracks.

"Katherine please. Listen to me. It's fine. You just walk in. You pay them. You walk and you just breathe and it's _fine._"

He pauses. She doesn't say anything.

"You walk to the back, and there's a hallway, and a door with her name on it, and you just… just get her, Katherine."

He hears her take a deep breath. "What about you?"

"I'm too far. I'm two minutes south of the office, and I need my goddamn case files. And you know you're the faster driver." That last part is supposed to be a joke, but it just turns to ash in his mouth as soon as he says it. She doesn't laugh, but he doesn't exactly expect her to.

"She's in danger," Katherine says quietly, and Damon finds himself nodding before he realizes that she can't see him. It doesn't matter, because Katherine is sighing into the phone. "The things I do for you," she says, and Damon doesn't think there was ever a chance of her saying 'no.'

"Where do I bring her?"

"Home. As quickly as you can. I'll meet you."

"I'm going," she says, and he is about to say _I love you_ but the line has already gone dead.

* * *

This is probably— _definitely_ —the stupidest thing that Damon has ever asked her to do, and she knows the rotting scent of danger from the moment she steps through the door. The music makes her stomach rumble, and if the man at the door is surprised to see a woman here, attempting to pay for entry, he doesn't show it. He takes Katherine's money and lets her inside, and dread sweeps over her in frantic waves. She bats it down and swallows her anxiety, and tries to picture Damon.

_You just breathe and it's fine,_ he's saying, and suddenly she can. Her lungs expand and fill with air and she takes some stumbling lurching steps away from the door. She thinks, abruptly, of family and friends vacations to the Lake Tahoe when they were younger. Her parents always loved to ski, especially before her mother died, and Damon and Katherine had known how to ski since they had learned to walk.

Damon, even at the tender age of seven, had taken to the hardest courses, whizzing past adults and his brother and the older kids. He was always wonderful, and never afraid. But Katherine had been as good as he— better, even — and still she had shied away from the courses that he took with ease. He had never been a worrier, he had never had the sense of self-preservation. She, on the other hand— well, by the time she had worked up the courage to give it a try, her broken family had stopped attending the ski slopes all together.

Now, she imagines her ski jacket wrapped around her, lets the memory hold her up and hangs on tightly to certainty that she does not feel. Her feet are deft and sure as she navigates the crowd. No one bothers her; no one notices her, perhaps because a woman wearing as many clothes as she is hardly interesting compared to the stripped bare women dancing on the stages.

Katherine glances at one, almost despite herself, and her first thought is of the photographs that Damon had spread out in the kitchen so many weeks ago. Her second thought is that the woman is gorgeous, and her smile so sincere though Katherine thinks it must be fake. Katherine pauses, mesmerized by the way her body moves, and she wonders, vaguely, how it would feel to stand up there. Once, only once, not so many times that the novelty dulled to horror, till debasement became routine. Just once, to be seen.

_Damon sees me,_ she thinks, and averts her eyes.

She's so busy looking at the floor that she almost walks directly into a topless woman carrying drinks. She is short and blonde and she snaps, "Watch it," and looks Katherine up and down with a critical eye that makes her shrink away. Even after the woman has stomped away, Katherine can feel her gaze, coarse and sticky, covering her jeans and leather jacket.

_Not the time,_ her brain snaps, and she forges onward, trying to look casual and probably not succeeding one bit.

When she slips into the hallway Damon mentioned, the din dulls to a painful pounding in her head. She looks left and right, at blank door after blank door, until she sees the door marked _Angel_. She tries to door.

_Locked._

Katherine takes a deep breath and looks back down the hallway. She can see the crowd surging and hear men shouting, and the music pounds. No one seems to notice her or the fact that she is standing where she doesn't belong.

So she turns and does the only thing she can think to. She knocks.

For a moment there is silence, and Katherine pictures all sorts of scenes beyond that door: the little girl with the long dark tresses, so much like her own, lying cold and dead and shot through the chest like all those other women. She can only picture her as Damon has described, and still the image makes her blanch.

But then the door cracks open, just a slit, and Katherine sees a single, sparkling dark eye.

"Angel," she breathes, and the door starts to shut.

_Shit,_ Katherine thinks, and slams her body into the door. She feels the body behind it give and the door swings inward, and Katherine steps inside and slams it shut. Angel is lying on the floor, exactly as Damon had described her, small and helpless looking. Her face is shrouded in long unkempt tresses.

Katherine realizes that she must have knocked her over with the force delivered to the door, but she doesn't feel guilty. Instead, she offers her hand. "I'm a friend of Damon's," she says quietly.

There is no response. Angel does not reach to take her hand, merely keeps staring up at her with glistening doe eyes.

"I've got to get you out of here," Katherine tries, and prays she is not about to encounter a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. She takes a deep breath. "You're in danger."

Katherine has no idea how much of what Damon said she can believe, and even how much of what he said he actually knows to be true. Still, she promised to do this for him, and goddammit she _will_ do it, even if she has to sling Angel over her back and carry her out. They'll see what a woman in jeans and a leather jacket can do.

Angel blinks up at her, and brushes her hair out of her face. "What happen to the other six?" she asks. "I never see them anymore."

She and Katherine stare at each other for a long moment before Katherine decides what to say. "It sounds like you already know."

There's silence, and Katherine can hear the roar of the music and every other sound seems to be footsteps coming up the hall. Then, after a long still moment, Angel reaches out and takes her hand. Katherine pulls her to her feet.

"Is there a back way out of here?" she asks.

Angel nods. "At the end of the hall." She reaches for her backpack, which Katherine would tell her to leave behind were it not so small. In the end, she doesn't have the heart.

When she peers out into the hallway, there is still no one looking, and she creeps out into the open with Angel at her heels. They're halfway to the door— Katherine can see the big red light marked _EXIT_ when she hears it, the furious whine of a woman's voice.

"What do you think you're _doing_?"

Katherine halts and turns, inexplicably, because the woman is behind them and all they have to do is make a run for the exit. But she wants to see; she has to see.

_Doll-woman,_ she thinks, and tries to remember the name that Damon used. Barbie_._

There is something grotesque about this woman's appearance, though she is all blond sparkles and has curves and a beautiful, beautiful face. It's in her movements, which jerk as though she's strung up like a marionette. It's in her clothes, which bind around her body like they're keeping her together. It's in her wrought gold hair and the red slash of her lips, the bloody colors that she paints her face on with.

Katherine stares, and she stares back, and Angel lingers between them.

"Angel, run," Katherine breathes, and to her credit, Angel does not hesitate, she turns and tears past Katherine, toward the exit sign. For a moment, Barbie looks as though she might give chase, but there's a stir behind her and a door opens.

"Bekah?" Katherine hears, and she cranes her neck to see who is speaking. Barbie spins as though the puppeteer has yanked the strings, and both she and Katherine stare at a sleepy looking boy, all messy honey brown hair and sharp lines for bones, and he doesn't look much older than Angel. He peeks out of the door on the other end of the hallway and blinks at them groggily before narrowing his eyes and smirking a little. "Woah, Bekah, what's going on?"

Barbie's voice is a shrill accusation as she turns to him. "Get lost, Kol. It's _not_ the time." She takes one shaky step toward him, away from Katherine.

Katherine turns and follows Angel out the door, and once the two of them are in her car, she slams on the gas and never looks back.

* * *

He's practically torn his office to pieces before he decides that the case files aren't there. He's on his way out when he thinks to check the desk drawer, and that's when Damon realizes that his closing report is gone. And it's all so obvious now, and for the first time in his life, Damon is glad that Klaus's office is right across the hall.

He stumbles in and doesn't bother to turn on the lights. The city lights coming through the great glass window is enough to illuminate the desk and as he approaches, and beside the carefully arranged computer and stationary and desk lamp, Damon sees the case files that he noticed earlier. He picks them up, and before he even opens them, he notices that the corner of the manila folder is a deep, dark brown, stained from being soaked in coffee just a couple months before.

Damon barely stops himself from punching a hole through the window, but he manages, and instead spreads the photographs out on the floor in the meager light. He bends over them and examines the gunshot wound on the closest. He sees the same black marker peeking out from beneath the sore and singed skin, only this time, he sees it for what it is.

He moves from one photograph to another, and it only confirms what he already knows. He wonders if Katherine's got Angel yet— he prays that she has —because he looks at each and every photo and finally sees them for what they are.

On each and every woman's chest, someone drew a black marker birth mark in the shape of a bird and then shot them straight through.

_Duck hunting. Goddammit, Katherine, hurry._

Here, in the encroaching darkness of Klaus's office, Damon feels suddenly, violently alone. He needs Mikaelson, he realizes, because Damon has been stewing around the same line of thought for the last God knows how long and he's so goddamn tired. This is why they get assigned partners, Damon finally understands, because the darkness that they seek to part is too deep for one man to penetrate all on his own.

He packs up the photographs and stands in the middle of the office. His eyes are starting to get used to the dark, and he only presses the wrong buttons twice before he manages to dial Klaus's number. He listens to his phone dial.

He hears it vibrate, first, from the top of Klaus's desk, and lights up of the entire room with it's glow. "Shit," Damon curses. "Where the fuck are you?" And that's when Klaus's phone actually starts ringing.

Damon's heart stops beating.

_Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster._

He takes a deep breath and makes what he considers the only good decisions. He runs, and Klaus's phone is still ringing.

_Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster._

* * *

She crashes into his arms the moment he slams open the door.

"She's in the bedroom," Katherine breathes into his neck. "I gave her some paper and a pen and I think she's drawing something. Damon, I—"

"She's drawing something," Damon says flatly. "Katherine, she's fifteen, not nine."

Katherine draws back, eyes flashing. "Anyone can draw. I didn't give her goddamn _crayons_ and set her up in front of Blue's Clues, she's got herself a fucking ballpoint pen and some printer paper so that she can have something to do. She might be fifteen but she's _scared_, and I can't say I blame her since I've never been more fucking frightened in my entire life."

Damon knows how much it probably hurts her to say that, but his own heart is pounding and his head is rattling like a thousand bright pills. He hasn't seen the little bottle of Vicodin in weeks. He opens his arms and she folds back into them, and he whispers his instructions into her hair because he knows they don't have time.

"You've got to take her, and you've got to drive. Head toward Las Vegas, to the hotel with the bouncy chapel and the man that married us that once." _Where the marriage wasn't real and no one asked if you were already married and oh my god I love you more than anything in the world._ "Take her and get in the car and stay on the interstate for as much of the drive as you possibly can."

"Damon—"

"I'll be after you. I promise."

"_Damon,"_ she snaps, and this time when he waits for her to speak she doesn't have anything to say. _I am so goddamn afraid,_ he wants to tell her, but instead he says, "He'll come here first," and watches her nod in her matter-of-fact way.

But he just holds her. For a moment. Even though it's not safe and there's another human being's safety riding on them. It's always been the two of them, and everyone else can burn, but still she tears herself away and looks into his eyes, and calls out, "Angel."

Still.

"Damon—" Angel calls as they're rushing out the door. "He's—"

But Katherine is whispering 'hush' and then they're gone. Damon slams the door shut. And then he waits.

He paces from room to room, and rifles through the papers on his desk. He sits down in the bathtub. He cranes his neck out one of the windows and stares down ten stories to the ground. He flexes the fingers on his injured hand. He writes a letter to Katherine about how much he loves her, and then he rips it to a thousand little pieces so that he doesn't have to see how jittery his handwriting has become. He heats up some spaghetti, and then doesn't eat it. Then he walks into the bedroom, and sits at the foot of the bed where Angel sat.

The covers aren't warm. There's a piece of paper on the bed, but Damon cannot see the pen, so he just picks it up and takes a look. His first thought is that Angel's left her drawing, that maybe she'll want it back, and then he sees what it is she's drawn.

A single castle spans the entire stretch of paper, rising toward the edges with tons of towers and turrets. Damon is astonished by the complexity. In all his life he's never drawn anything this intricate. The roofs and ramparts are blanketed in what seems like glitter, probably meant to represent sunlight. A young woman stands on one of the balconies, staring out over some city that might stretch off of the page. What appears to be snowy feathers are swirling around the two other girls standing a little behind her. Katherine must have given her several pens, not one, for, while the rest of the drawing is rendered in black ink, one of the girls' eyes are colored a bright sparkling blue, and the other has the most beautiful shade of chocolate skin Damon had no idea could be depicted in a drawing.

Despite its complexity, the drawing is still a child's, but anyone would recognize the young woman as Angel, strung up in a tower that could almost reach the stars.

At the top of the paper is one word, scrawled in bold block letters.

"Mystic Falls," Damon reads aloud, and lies down on his back and wonders what would happen if he fell asleep.

* * *

"I kind of imagine that I live in a castle," Angel is saying, and Katherine is amazed by the change in her manner. When they were in Damon's company, she had been quiet and unassuming, terrified and shy, but as she sits in the passenger seat of Katherine's car, contentedly munching the bag of chips Katherine had offered her, she can't stop chattering. Katherine can almost imagine that this is a normal little girl, her little girl, even. She can almost pretend that Angel has never had sex, that she has a normal name like Jessica or Emily— that Damon wouldn't want to fuck her if she grew a couple years.

"Really?" Katherine asks.

Angel nods into her bag of chips. "It's very big, and it's almost always filled with people there, and everyone is friendly and smiling and they all know each other. Anyway, I live there, and I'm actually— it's stupid, but I'm actually the Angel of Mystic Falls— oh that's what the castle is called, Mystic Falls —and that means that I'm very kind to all the people, and everyone thinks I am sweet but not without reason because I try to show my best to everyone, and I have these two best friends, and their names are—"

She falters for a moment, then, and crumples up her empty bag of chips. "Their names are Caroline and Bonnie," she says quietly, and squeezes her hands together until her knuckles turn white. "I'm talking too much, aren't I?" she whispers.

"Of course not," Katherine says, surprised to hear herself say the words without a hint of sarcasm, but Angel doesn't resume talking.

Katherine is once again astonished at the changes that Angel undergoes. She wonders if this has something to do with what she's paid for, that a tiny little changeling is worth more than any common whore. As far as young girls go, this one is like no other. Katherine has to wonder, briefly, if she is less the victim than she seems. Still, she glances out the corner of her eyes at the brittle little creature curled up in the seat beside her. Angel's unwashed hair is bound up in a knot atop her head, her thin body swathed in a sweater and pair of shorts from Katherine's own closet.

Fif_teen,_ she thinks, and wonders how someone who has experienced so much more than most fifteen-year-olds could seem so much younger. Katherine tries to remember herself at fifteen, but no memories come. That was the year that Damon first slid his hand down the eagerly unbuttoned front of her shorts, and Stefan had seen and-

"Tell me more," Katherine says evenly – she does need to keep the girl talking.

Angel looks up at her with those uncertain big brown eyes, and then she speaks. "I am part of a big family, who love me as if I were their own, and everything's... _magical_. We fight and get almost killed all the time, but—" She pauses and thinks for a moment. "But I think I would love them all anyway. Yes," she says with more certainty. "I would have to love them anyway."

Katherine starts to laugh, as she thinks about her and Damon and the fights they have had, both as adults and children, and all the times they damn near got themselves killed. As her eyes flicker and catch on something in the rear-view mirror, her laughter dies in her throat, and she pulls her cell phone from her pocket.

She tosses it to Angel. "Dial Damon," she says quietly. "He's on speed dial. Number one."

* * *

He's half asleep when the phone rings, and the almost eerie jingle of it makes him forget where he is. Damon sits bolt upright on the bed and looks around him, and when his eyes canvas the unfamiliar planes of his own bedroom, he feels like he is falling. He wants some Vicodin and a long nap and to wake up and have this be a dream.

Somehow, he makes it to the phone, tripping and stumbling over carpet that he has traversed half a million times. His feet drag and his head pounds, and when he takes the phone in the palm of his hand, it feels too large, and he too clumsy.

"Hello?" he says wearily, and the voice on the other end is Angel's.

"Damon," she says, in her peculiar quiet way. "We're being followed."

His heart hammers to a horrible stop. In the background, over what seems like deafening static and the rolling sputter of a car on the road, Damon can hear Katherine talking.

_Tell her I love her,_ he thinks, and Katherine says, "Repeat to him exactly what I'm about to say," and when Angel nods and swallows, it causes a crackling in his ears that Damon doesn't think will ever go away.

* * *

They pull over on the side of the interstate, not five miles outside of Los Angeles. Katherine parks them in the parking lot of an abandoned bowling alley, one she thinks she visited once with Damon as a child. It's the only build for miles on either side, and nature has all but overtaken it as this point. Shrubs and ferns and bushes spring from all the crumbling bricks, and the night air ruffles all the green leaves as Katherine steps out of the car. She can hear Angel do the same.

They stand by the side of her vehicle, as calm as they can be considering the circumstances, and watch the little red car pull into the parking lot beside them. A man steps out, tall and lithe and dark haired, and from the passenger side, Barbie, and though Katherine is hardly surprised to see her, she is surprised at the way she hangs off the man's arm, grinning wildly all the while.

"Hi, Mikaelson," she says quietly.

His mouth turns into a grin. "Hello. I have a first name you know, though I do hate it and your— Damon never would call me by it. I suppose you've picked up the habit from him then."

Katherine can feel Angel trembling beside her. She bats down the overwhelming urge to wrap her arm around the girl. She should have had her stay in the car. This is beyond dangerous, for both of them, but the car wouldn't have kept running on an eighth of a tank of gas forever, and Katherine doesn't have a gun, and she doesn't have a little tracking device that lets Damon know where she is, either. But she does have a voice box, and all she needs is for that to give her _time_.

"Care to explain the crony?" she says, and nods her head toward Barbie.

"Oh?" Klaus says, and pulls Barbie toward him by the waist. "This is my beloved Rebekah."

He acts as though that explains everything, and Katherine is so tempted to just say _ah_ that she has to bite her lip to keep from doing it.

Klaus shakes off Rebekah's arm and steps forward. He reaches a hand toward Angel and drops in a deep, honest bow. "My Angel," he says with a flourish and a hell lot of accent, and Katherine thinks of Mystic Falls and all the glittering glittering sun.

* * *

The car sputters and dies beneath the palms of his hands. Damon curses, furious, and reaches for the gun sitting on the seat next to him. Six bullets. One gun. One and a half functioning hands. Damon's shaking all over as he opens the car door and steps out into the night.

The interstate stretches onward, into streetlamp lit darkness on either side. It's up ahead; he knows it is, because they went there once as children and Katherine kicked his ass.

Damon swears he heard her smile when she said that she was stopping there, even if her voice was full of resignation. _I love you,_ he'd tried to say, but he'd just hung up the phone and started the car, and pounded the gas with his foot so hard that the damned car didn't even get him all the way there.

Damon takes a deep breath of the night air, grips the gun as tightly as he can, and starts running.

* * *

"You killed a lot of people," Katherine says. She's still got no gun, but she still has a voice box, even now as Rebekah is tying her wrists together behind her back. She tries to think quickly and draws a blank, especially as she watches the way that Klaus is touching Angel.

They're at least ten feet apart now, Katherine tethered to the car by a stretch of some scratchy twine, and Angel held tightly against Klaus with her back to his car.

Klaus ignores her. "You're wearing _her_ clothes," she hears him say to Angel, who doesn't say a single word in response. Strong and still and statuesque, she just stands there.

_That's my girl,_ Katherine thinks, as Rebekah's red slash of a mouth curves into a smile.

"Strip her down, Klaus," she says. "Strip her down like you did the others."

Klaus's head snaps around; it's almost like he'd forgotten they were there. But he turns away, and whispers, "Step out of her clothes, Angel. They're dirty. You shouldn't have them on you."

The gentleness with which he helps her out from underneath Katherine's sweater and shorts is so disgusting that Katherine almost vomits, but she swallows it down and tries to think of something she can say that will stop this. Klaus has a hold of Angel's wrists, and he looks her up and down, and Katherine commends her courage that she does not shiver as the wind whips through the parking lot.

"You killed a lot of people," she repeats, louder, and Klaus's head makes that same snapping motion. This time he stares at her, eyes burning like red coals in the night.

"He killed a lot of _whores_," Rebekah corrects, and pinches the skin on Katherine's upper arm with long red nails. She barely feels it.

"You killed a lot of women," she calls over the wind, "because of what they had to do to support themselves."

Klaus laughs. "You glorify them so much. A whore is a fucking whore."

"A human being is a human being," Katherine shouts back. "And senseless violence is senseless violence."

Klaus smirks. "And a stupid little girl who won't stay quiet gets herself killed." He lifts the edge of his shirt— _oh god please don't let it be a gun_ —and reveals the knife tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

_Better than a gun,_ Katherine thinks, but her heart sinks nonetheless.

But no – no, somehow they'll survive this, they _have_ to.

Anxiety descends on her like a net, and she vividly remembers something Damon said once about feeling trapped inside himself, with a situation closing in around him like a set of walls. She closes her eyes and for a moment wishes just to die, so that she does not have to live like this, imagining all the endings that are each worse than the last. She takes a deep breath, and tells herself to _be strong because even Angel is_, this little girl who's losing life one battle at a time.

Katherine opens her eyes and Klaus's holding Angel close, and what's horrible about it is the way that Angel does not move. For all of Rebekah's Barbie similarities, it is Angel who is the doll in this situation, and she plays her part to a perfection that has Katherine looking away.

"You honestly don't understand why I did it," Klaus says, and he sounds positively astonished. The knife is in his hand now, and he plays it idly between his fingers, so that the blade passes closer and closer to Angel's exposed skin with ever twirl. "Do I have to explain?" And that's when Katherine sees him.

_Damon._

The sight is like a sigh of relief inside her head, a quick and beautiful release of all her fear. It's not that Damon has come to save them. It's that he has always brought out the worst and best in her. Now that he is here, he can be her strength, she is sure he can.

Katherine stares at the bobbing of his dark head as he gets closer and closer, and gauges the seconds until Klaus notices him coming up behind. _Onetwothreefourfive_— she cannot wait, and she kicks her foot back as hard as she can into Rebekah's leg. The woman doubles over, clenching shut her black button eyes and Katherine kicks her again, ignoring her cry of outrage.

_You have to survive this, Katherine, you have to_-

Klaus watches, impassive, as Katherine stamps her to the ground, and, because her hands are still tied to the car, does the only thing that makes the slightest bit of sense. She presses her foot down on Rebekah's neck, pinning it between her and the ground.

Rebekah groans and gurgles and her big button eyes appeal to Klaus, who looks on with cold dispassion. "Should I explain?" he repeats, when Rebekah has quieted, as though nothing more has happened than a small wind passing through.

"No," Katherine says, and looks past him. "Not everyone is here yet."

* * *

He's got a knife to Angel's neck, or almost.

That's the first thing Damon sees when he comes crashing across the parking lot, gun in hand. There's an air of insanity to the whole scene, as he takes in Katherine tied to the car and Rebekah struggling for breath on the pavement; Klaus with his sickly little smirk and Angel, lovely little Angel, who appears as though she couldn't care less that she is naked.

_Room for one more?_ Damon thinks.

When Klaus sees him, his face stretches into a grin. "Damon," he says, and he sounds legitimately pleased, and for a moment Damon wonders how he never noticed this before; the crippling and obvious insanity that is gripping Klaus by the heart.

But then again, Damon knows a lot about concealing one's insanity.

_There's nothing wrong with him._ Klaus slides his free hand along Angel's hip. _Sex is just disorienting._

"This isn't about sex, is it?" Damon breathes, and points the gun at Klaus's chest. The man draws Angel across him, so that her body covers as much of him as possible. Damon almost lowers the gun.

"Do you want me to say it, Damon?" Klaus sighs, so low that his words are almost carried off by the wind. "How I like to fuck them before I kill them? By God, I try to pretend that I'm despoiling them but they're just so _loose_. Do you know what that's like, Damon? To be with a loose woman?" His eyes fall indolently on Katherine, whose foot presses down harder on Rebekah's throat.

Damon's hand tightens on his gun.

Klaus isn't paying attention. "I like to kill them while I'm inside them, you know. _Then_ they're spoiled. That's the easy way to do it. But the best part— oh, the _best_ part —is the way they smile when they see the gun."

He pauses to grip Angel's face with one hand and slide his lips along her jaw. When he exhales against her neck, she doesn't even move. It's like she hasn't even noticed that he's there.

"They see the gun, Damon. And they smile like I've done something absolutely clever, and they all say something _cute_ about 'the big boy who likes to play with guns.' You know what happens then?" Klaus's voice cracks. "Do you? I shoot them through the chest and they tighten and then slacken and I dump those _whores_ right back where I found them. Life is like virginity, Damon, and I got theirs." He starts laughing. "Do you have any idea how disappointing it is, once something's been spoiled? And every time I hoped it might be different. Every bloody time I put the gun to one of their chests and pulled the trigger and they were just as dirty dull and lifeless as the ones that came before."

He shakes his head. Damon watches blond curls, shining like gold under the moonlight, fall in front of his burning eyes.

"But don't you understand? I couldn't have _her_." His hands tighten on Angel's arms so that his knuckles turn white. She'll be bruised if he ever lets go. "I knew. I was so smart and I knew that I didn't want her like that, with that look on her face and her body moving like theirs and the way they fucking smiled when I pulled the gun—" He stops, and for a moment Damon fears that Klaus is going to stop and kill her, but he composes himself, and he keeps talking. Damon wants so badly for him to just stop talking. "I even drew the little birds on their chests." His hand glides over Angel's belly, and this time Damon sees the goose-prickles on her exposed skin.

"Sometimes I wanted to stop, and I would go twenty-four hours and I would just start to forget why she was different. I had to keep doing it, Damon. Don't you see? I had to see them like that to know why she was different. She wouldn't be like them." He clenches his jaw. "It was so important that she never be like them."

_Is she still alive in there?_ he wonders, as Angel blinks and doesn't move.

"You want too many things," Damon says quietly.

"I want _everything_," Klaus hisses. "So shoot me. Shoot me for it. I wanted to love them all and none of them were worthy. But I'll tell you this, Damon, I enjoyed every fucking second of it. You said it yourself: they might have been whores, but they were still people, just like _her."_ He touches Angel's cheek with his pointer finger and Damon thinks of Katherine. "Their blood runs red, and I _spilled_ it."

Klaus stops then, and now that Damon's got his wish he wants to give it back. He wants Klaus to keep talking forever so that Damon can fall into insanity alongside him, so that he can drop the gun and walk away and never be faced with this decision.

_To shoot or not to shoot._ Klaus clutches Angel to him, spreads her out across his front a nagged sagging mess. His fingers glide across her pale slim hips and brush her birdie-birthmark. _There's nothing wrong with him, sex is just disorienting._

_Is that the truth?_

"Shoot me, Damon. Shoot me or I'll kill her."

And that's the last thing he expects to hear, and now that the words are hanging in the air he has no idea what to do with them.

Then Angel smiles. It's a small, stupid slip of a thing that Damon is almost sure he has imagined, like the pill bottle in his pocket or Katherine's sparkly sweater. But she lets go, and then she's just a brittle bird-boned statue in a monster's loving arms.

_What do you want from me?_

Klaus isn't tall, but he's taller than Angel, and there are places and moments, spots in space and time where Damon cocks the gun and does not hit her. Klaus's arm is around her neck but her eyes are not afraid; she looks at Damon and stares at him with only empty icicles.

_She's already dead,_ he realizes.

Damon takes a deep breath and Klaus is smiling, and Damon pictures a hundred little white pills dissolving uselessly in a puddle of cold coffee. In a moment, he tastes the empty icicle eyes of six cold cadavers; he has used them, hurt them, broke them, _been them_.

Damon sees his hands that tighten on the gun as bloodied around the neck of a beautiful woman, so that he almost lets go in revulsion and disgust. At the last moment, Klaus's hold tenses around his prize. Of all the ways this could have gone, he never meant to lose her, but even in the second that he knows that he will die, he does not push her away. He holds her close like absolution that Damon knows she will not give.

His jittery fingers rattle against the trigger, and for a long second he is a thousand miles away, stuck three years in his past, crashing down two stories toward the ground. It feels as though he's falling forever; his heart burns like a furnace, and then he's reaching out with one right hand to try and break his fall. He hits, and shatters.

And, in the middle of a deserted parking lot, somewhere off the interstate between California and Nevada, Damon Salvatore opens fire.

_Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster._

_Onetwothreefourfivesix shots_ before it's done, and he's panting and there's blood and his red regrets spattered everywhere and he remembers, vividly, reading Frankenstein as a child. _She was already dead,_ he reminds himself.

And then, somewhere behind him, Rebekah starts laughing. "Elena," she rattles with Katherine's foot against her throat. "Her name was Elena."

_Elena,_ Damon thinks. He tastes the word in the cracks between his teeth and his tongue, and looks down at the mess that he has made. _Naked naked naked with a bullet between her breasts._


End file.
